by Steven James
Hmm . . . access to the Federal Digital Database? Maybe even FALCON? Now, there’s an interesting thought—
But before I could consider it any further or Jake could expand on his statement, the door to the conference room swung open with a decisive bang.
It was Kurt. “Someone posted an article online about the crimes,” he said. “She knows about The Decameron. She’s calling our guy ‘The Day Four Killer.’”
77
“Pull it up,” I told Jake, whose computer was still connected to the wall monitor.
He tapped at his keyboard, opened his Internet browser, and typed in the phrase “Day Four Killer.”
The article “Medieval Manuscript Inspires Brutal Slayings” popped up. Jake clicked the webpage, and we all read in silence.
Overall, the article was little more than conjecture, hypothesis, and armchair profiling, but it did contain a few details that we hadn’t released to the media—some of the wording from the 911 calls, the fact that Chris Arlington’s heart had been found in the mine along with Heather’s body, and information about the attempt on Kelsey Nash’s life. The author also mentioned the pot of basil but incorrectly noted that it contained the head of Sebastian Taylor rather than Travis Nash.
Though it wasn’t illegal to write about the crimes, it was illegal to publicly share privileged information about an ongoing investigation, as this author had done. I asked Kurt if he knew anything about the author.
He shook his head. “It was written by someone named Deniece Johnson, but as far as we can tell, that’s just a pseudonym.”
With the head in the pot of basil reference, the obvious choice for the author was Amy Lynn Greer.
But still, the article’s too specific for her to have—
“We have a leak,” Captain Terrell said. And this time, I found myself agreeing with the fan of profilers.
For a moment everyone in the room seemed to be studying each other, looking for a guilty gesture, a suspicious action. At last, Jake surprised me and said, “I think we should postpone the briefing and look into this. Maybe we can reconvene later this afternoon.”
He looked to Captain Terrell for support.
The captain considered the suggestion, then nodded. “Everyone do your homework. Kurt, you and I will look into this article ourselves, track down the author, find our leak.” He checked the time. “We’ll meet back here at four.” A couple of the people looked at their watches and seemed to be ready to argue with the announcement, but in the end kept their mouths shut.
Four o’clock would be perfect since I’d be boarding my plane to Chicago. “Great,” I said. “Jake can finish up then.”
Then Captain Terrell dismissed everyone, except for Reggie Greer, whom he asked to join him in the hall, and I guessed that the captain shared my suspicion that Reggie’s wife Amy Lynn was the author.
Everyone left the room, but I stayed behind. Something in the article had caught my eye. I opened my laptop and surfed to the webpage.
Reread it.
Yesterday, I’d scanned the transcripts of the 911 calls on the way to Taylor’s house, and whoever wrote this article had included the phrase “dusk is coming”—a fact that the author definitely shouldn’t have known.
And that was something I could look into right away. It was possible the 911 calls would lead us to the leak.
After grabbing my things, I stepped into the hall and was both surprised and pleased to find Cheyenne waiting for me.
“Hey,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that article.”
“Me too. I was hoping to look into the anonymous calls. I need some more details. I think I’d like to hear the audio for myself.”
She looked at me with admiration and a touch of suspicion. “How about that? I was thinking the same thing.”
“Good. You’re keeping up with me.”
“Great minds,” she said. Then she started for the elevator bank. “Dispatch is in the basement. We can check it out right now.”
78
As we entered the elevator, Cheyenne glanced at me. “By the way, I was impressed by your self-control in there, during Jake’s briefing.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a tactful, self-controlled kind of guy.”
“Huh. That’s good to know.” She pressed “L” for the lower level, which was actually the floor above the underground parking garage. “Then can I ask you a personal question, Mr. Tact?” She watched the elevator doors close.
“Shoot.”
We descended.
“What happened between you and Lien-hua?”
OK, that came out of nowhere.
Even though it was a little awkward to talk about Lien-hua, I took it as a good sign that Cheyenne was asking about her. “I’m not exactly sure,” I said. “But honestly, it wasn’t the old cliché of work being more important than the relationship. We were careful about that.” The elevator stopped. Beeped. “One thing maybe: right before we started seeing each other, she nearly died. Actually, she did die, but I was able to bring her back.”
“Wow.” The doors opened and we exited.
“Yes, well, I think that in time it strained things between us, made for an awkward dynamic, as if there was some sort of an obligation for her to like me, not simply a choice.”
We started down the hall.
“In addition, before she died, for a short time I thought she was involved in a biotech conspiracy. She told me she didn’t hold that against me, but I have a feeling it affected things . . . then she was on leave for a while . . .”
“If you don’t want to talk about this,” Cheyenne said, “it’s OK.”
“Lien-hua is still in DC.” Only after I said the words did I realize how out of place they must have sounded. I didn’t even know why I’d said them. Maybe to let Cheyenne know Lien-hua wasn’t in the picture anymore.
“DC,” Cheyenne replied. “So, the same city where you’ll be living this summer?”
“Um. Yes.” I didn’t want to talk about Lien-hua anymore. We were halfway down the hallway. I ventured a personal question.
“So what about you?”
“You mean a guy?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing serious, not for a long time. This may surprise you, but I’ve been told I intimidate men.”
“You’re kidding. Really?”
“Shocking, I know. Although, I should tell you, I was married once, right out of college. We were together about five years.”
“Do you mind if I ask what happened?”
A small pause. “Every affair begins with a smile.”
With every moment the conversation was becoming more and more intimate, and my judgment told me to stop asking follow-up questions, but I went ahead anyway. “So, were you smiling or was he?”
I’d probably stepped way over the line, but Cheyenne didn’t seem to mind. “For a while we both were,” she said. “In the end, I left the guy I was smiling at, and Cody left me.” She paused and then added, “Cody Howard was my husband.”
“Cody Howard, the DPD’s helicopter pilot?”
“One and the same.”
I didn’t see that one coming.
At least that explained why she wouldn’t fly with him.
We arrived at the dispatch office, and as she was about to press the door open, I asked her to wait a second. “Listen, I wanted to say, I’m sorry about last night.”
“About what?”
“Sorry about when you said you were thinking I was going to kiss you . . .”
“Yes?”
“And I didn’t.”
A small pause. She looked amused. “Yes, I do remember that, come to think of it.”
“So anyway, I wasn’t trying to blow you off. I’m just . . . well, I felt kind of bad about how things ended.”
“Pat,” she said, straightening my collar. “I don’t think they ended.”
And as I was searching for a reply, she pushed open the door to the EMS dispatch center and stepped inside.
79
Once inside the dispatch room, Cheyenne went to locate the on-duty supervisor while I waited by the door and gazed around the room, which was lit only by the bluish glow of computer monitors and the few remaining overhead fluorescents that weren’t burned out.
A sign on the wall to my right read:
Remember the Three Ws!
Where is the Incident?
Are there Wounds?
Are there Weapons?
Lives depennd on YOU!!
A misspelled word. Overuse of exclamation points. Unnecessary capitalization. Tessa would have gone ballistic.
Nine dispatchers were on duty in the cluttered cubicles, and most of them had at least two computers, two headset mics, and a floor pedal for transferring and receiving calls. Everyone looked wired and sleep-deprived. The room smelled like old bologna and burned coffee. Eight cubicles sat empty.
With the stress, long hours, low pay, and emotional drain, it’s not easy to find people to be EMS dispatchers. I don’t know of any major city in the U.S. where the emergency services department isn’t short staffed and constantly looking to hire. In fact, one recent Johns Hopkins University study found that being a dispatcher in a major metropolitan area is just as stressful as being an air traffic controller. Maybe that’s what accounts for the 60 percent annual turnover rate.
And here’s the irony: most high schools have more up-to-date computer systems than EMS services do, and yet, even though dispatchers potentially hold a person’s life in their hands with every call, most states don’t even require applicants to have a high school degree.
When a call comes in, a dispatcher might hear a gunshot, hear a body fall, listen as the line goes dead, and sixty to seventy seconds later he’s on the phone again with someone else. The dispatchers never find out what happened to the previous caller unless they read about it in the paper or maybe catch the story on the evening news.
But none of the dispatchers I know watch the local news or read the paper.
It’s just too painful.
Cheyenne returned with a man who identified himself as Lancaster Cowler.
He swaggered toward me like an ex-jock but looked like he hadn’t done a push-up in the last twenty years. A roll of stomach fat oozed out of the space between his shirt and his belt like the tip of a giant tongue. “Special Agent Bowers,” he said, his voice moist and thick.
I shook his hand. “Mr. Cowler, I don’t want to keep you long. I just have a couple questions about the anonymous calls reporting the double homicides on Thursday and Friday.”
“Woman who took the calls isn’t in today,” he said. “Weekends off. You know. To be with her kids.”
“Can we see if anyone else has accessed those files?”
“Sure.” He leaned his head to the side and called to a man sitting beside a pair of computer screens. “Ari, I need you to pull a couple of audio files for us.”
The guy looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. “Which ones?” His eyes remained glued to the screen on the left, which contained a panel of dispatch codes and a map of Denver with digital blips representing the current GPS location of the city’s emergency vehicles.
Cowler ambled toward the man’s desk. “Double homicides.”
Ari turned to the screen on his right and quickly scrolled through the database of the week’s digitally recorded calls. “Do you know the times?” Even though Ari looked over thirty, his face was covered with acne. The only things on his desk that showed he had a life outside of this room were a Star Trooper action figure, a Semper Fi plaque for ten years of service, and a silver ceramic dragon with outstretched wings.
I watched the call times scroll down the screen. “There.” I pointed to an entry from Thursday afternoon. “And there.” I identified the second call.
Ari tapped at the keyboard and brought up the first file. Cowler studied the screen. “Nope, reference number doesn’t show anyone else accessing the files, except the medical examiner’s office. But that’s typical for them to do before an autopsy.”
“Let’s hear the first call,” I said.
As Ari played the audio, the automated live-read transcription scrolled across the screen:
EMS: “This is 911. How—”
CALLER: “I have something to tell you. I need you to listen carefully.”
EMS: “Sir, can you tell me your name?”
CALLER: “There’s a body in Bearcroft Mine, three miles south of Idaho Springs. Take Wheelan to Piney Oaks Road. After 5.3 miles, take the dirt road to the right. It ends at the mine. I want you to send—”
EMS: “Who am I speaking with?”
CALLER: “The Rocky Mountain Violent Crimes Task Force. No one enters the mine before they do, or more people will die. You won’t find Chris, so don’t waste time looking for him.”
EMS: “Sir, are you there now? Are you in any danger—”
CALLER: “Dusk is coming. I won’t stop until the story is done. Day Four ends on Wednesday.”
EMS: “Sir—”
CALL TERMINATED BY CALLER.
The second audio was similarly concise but listed Taylor’s address and Cherry Creek Reservoir as the location for the bodies.
The caller’s voice was electronically disguised, and although I couldn’t be certain, it sounded like the pitch, pauses, and cadence of the speech on both tapes matched the speech patterns of the man who’d called me earlier in the day.
However, I heard background noise on both recordings. As I was considering what it might have been, Cowler asked me, “What are you hoping to find, exactly?”
Rather than sound arrogant by listing the phonetic and intonation identifiers, I simply said, “I’m trying to listen for anything distinctive, individualized. Anything that could help us match the caller to a suspect.” Then I asked Ari to play them again.
Yes, there was definitely something there, although it was a different sound on each tape. “Do we know what those background noises are?” I asked Cowler.
“Background sounds?”
“It sounds like murmuring on the first tape and something else—I’m not sure what—on the second.”
“All right, Ryman,” Cowler said. “Let’s hear ’em one more time.” He handed me and Cheyenne headphones, grabbed a pair for himself, plugged them into the system, and then nodded for Ari Ryman to play the audio again.
After we’d listened to the calls again, we all removed our headphones and Cowler shook his head. “It can get loud in here. It just sounds like background noise from the other dispatchers. It’s probably nothing.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s this: when someone says “it’s probably nothing,” you should never believe him.
I knew CSU had studied the tapes, but I needed to have them analyzed a little more carefully. However, before I could request a copy of them, a call came in, and the man with the Star Trooper action figure took a quick gulp from a well-worn mug filled with gray coffee and spoke into one of his two headset microphones. “911. Please state the nature of your emergency.”
We stepped away.
Apart from the ambient noise, I didn’t notice anything unusual about the audio messages.
“Well,” Cheyenne said to me on our way to the door. “What do you think?”
I tried to hide the discouragement in my voice. “The phonemes seem to match the ones used by the man who called me earlier in the day, but with the voice distortion the caller used, I doubt I’d be able to recognize the speaker’s natural voice if I heard it. I’m still wondering how the author of the online article found out the wording from the calls.”
“So am I.”
Cowler led us to the door, and I was about to hand him my card and ask him to email me a copy of the audio files and transcriptions but realized that would just take more time—something we didn’t have. So instead I asked him if I could use one of the computers for a minute.
He shrugged. “Sure, we have one set aside for DPD use.
Right over here.”
He led me to one of the empty work stations at the far end of the room.
80
After I’d taken a seat, Cowler showed me how to pull up the audio files. I clicked past the hyperlinks to the Federal Digital Database’s GPS and address locators until I came to the audio archives, then I emailed a copy of both the files and transcriptions, to myself and to Angela Knight at the FBI cybercrime division.
I added a request for Angela to run the audio for the calls through a voice spectrograph. “See if you can isolate that background noise for me,” I wrote. “And as usual, I need this ASAP. —Pat.”
I thanked Cowler, and as Cheyenne and I entered the hallway, I glanced at my watch and realized I needed to get moving if I were going to have time to grab my luggage from home, say good-bye to Tessa, and then catch my flight.
“I have to go,” I told her.
“Wait,” she said. “Swing by my car first. It’ll only take a minute. There’s something I’ve been wanting to give you.”
Amy Lynn was putting another video in for Jayson to watch when a call came through on her BlackBerry. She dug it out. “Yes?”
“They came by.” It was Ari. He sounded frantic. “What did you write?”
She turned on the television and set a box of snack crackers on the floor for the boy to eat. “Who came by?” She’d lowered her voice. “What are you talking about?”
“Some detectives. You wrote something about—”
“Just calm down. OK?” She stepped away from the television.
“I just don’t want anyone to find out that we talked.”
“I know.”
“Mommy,” Jayson said. “Can I watch—”